for you know only a heap of broken images
by pondglorious
Summary: Post-Hannibal stuff, Pre-Red Dragon (I think?). In which I reference poetry and cry to myself about it.


1

The second time he kisses her he says:

"Don't leave this time."

(She might have kissed him, neither can really tell, but it was probably a sort of mutual gravitation at this point;) He feels her smile against his lips.

I could be a murderer, he wants to say. But she'll just kiss him again. I am undeserving, he wants to say. She'll shut him up with her lips. I'll lose you, he wants to say. And she'll pause, refusing to accept that.

There are blood stains on his hands, the weight of lives not saved and memories of another's kill on his shoulders and tainting his mind; and all she lets him focus on his her mouth on his.

He was only half kidding, but it brings a breathless relief when she says, "I won't."

2

As always, he dreams. He thinks he knows why dreaming is a comfort to others: you can't die in a dream. But what you can do, is watch someone else die. In blackness, encased by nightmares and blood, always blood; with ghosts and demons alike, he drowns.

It is not as if she can saunter into his dreams and sing him out of them with euphoric lullabies. They both know she can't do anything but be there; and sometimes, it's enough. She distracts him. She's always been a good distraction.

Alana doesn't press or pry about what demons unfold in his psyche; that is not the point of distractions. Distractions are; a temporary fix. It is questions she distracts him with. Questions about; the dogs, how he found them or how he named them; his lures, his lake, his catches; the boatyards, the contented bits of childhood not imbued with loneliness.

It's his favorite poem she asks about tonight. It's genuine curiosity that drives her to it; Will is a poet himself, throws his work around casually, slips it into his dialogue as if everyone wove hymns into their words. Alana asks because she wants to know what poets live in the poet that lives in him; she asks because she likes the way he sounds late at night, unfiltered and unreserved. Likes his perceptions of the world, finds relief that brutality is not all his eyes allow him to see. She could listen to him for hours and never grow tired. Sometimes it breaks her heart, that this man is so brimming with knowledge and kindness and so long had no one to share it with.

Alana isn't sure what she is expecting, maybe Poe or Plath or someone equally dreary and occult, but she should have known he'd surprise her. What she wasn't expecting was: "T.S. Eliot, _The Wasteland._"

She asks him why. He looks over, a shadow obscuring her face but a tremor of light passing over her hair, scintillating black and white in the moonlight. Her hair isn't black, he knows; it's carmine and auburn and bisque when it catches the sunlight in angles.

A stanza is what he answers with. He thinks of a hyacinth garden and wet hair and the sea; it almost spills from his lips but he saves it for later, for reasons he can't clarify.

"A heap of broken images, where the sun beats,

And the dead tree gives no shelter, the cricket no relief,

And the dry stone no sound of water. Only

There is shadow under this red rock,

(Come in under the shadow of this red rock),

And I will show you something different from either

Your shadow at morning striding behind you

Or your shadow at evening rising to meet you;

I will show you fear in a handful of dust."

Alana is quiet for a long time, lets the silence surround them in the air. Then she rolls over. "Thank you. I hadn't realized how personal it is," she says, "to ask someone's favorite poem."

Will hadn't either, apparently, but he is hit with the depth and brevity of her statement. Abruptly he feels dauntingly raw and vulnerable, translucent like cellophane, fragile like china glass.

But then she twines her fingers through his and remembers that she looks through him, not past him, that she would never break him.

With her, he learns to float in the darkness instead of drown it in it.

3

There's something he wants to tell her, something he can't find the words for. But it piques through him when they're driving with the radio blaring to some 80's song neither of them know the words to but they sing along, incoherently, laughing nonetheless; when they hold hands in the meat section of the grocery store; when he wakes at 2am from a nightmare to find her curled around him; when he sees her cry. He thinks what he wants to say is_ I love you_, even though he's said it before and he'll say it again, but sometimes,_ I love you _just doesn't seem enough.

There are an obscene amount of people uttering those words; the young and the old, to mothers, to daughters, to sons to fathers to lovers. People who have known each other for as long as they've known themselves, people who met in the night and will forget in the morning. It's a worn out declaration of affection; people have been saying they love one another since the earth began and will until the day it dies. No one is a stranger to love, certainly not Will, but being in it still used to be a hazy, intangible thing, the same way _family_ is.

He's trying to say _I love you_ because sometimes,_ I love you_ just doesn't seem -

_big enough._

As it turns out, Alana says it for him: "I _care_ about you. More than anyone...or anything...ever."

The word love seemed so meager before, and now he knows why. Because that-

somehow that means so, so much more.

She also says something else, later, when darkness descends and so do the dreams. But when he wakes he's so full of her there is not room for much else; mouth thick with her name, hands brimming with her hair, mind cleansing itself of devils and replacing them with her scent, her slight frame pressed into his, her voice. He wants her to hold her hold him so tight his bones might break, but that he wouldn't mind so much. If he has to be broken he'd prefer it to be her hands to do the damage.

This time, the words fresh in her mind, she recites to him instead.

"Who is the third who walks always beside you?

When I count, there are only you and I together

But when I look ahead up the white road

There is always another one walking beside you

Gliding wrapt in a brown mantle, hooded

I do not know whether a man or a woman

-But who is that on the other side of you?"

Will is silent for a very long time. Alana doesn't tell him that she'd read the poem even though she'd read it before, that she pored over it for hours, reading and rereading again, as if analyzing, fully and completely understand his favorite poem will reveal the parts of him shrouded and blackened to her, the parts she can't see, the wandering darkness in him she can't reach.

Will tries not to think about the ulterior insinuations of the recitation of this specific stanza to him; instead he revels in the knowledge that she read it at all, enough to memorize it. That she cares that much. Her curiosity is breathtaking in ways he never expected it to be.

Almost timidly, he asks if she wants him to read it to her, and even in the darkness he can see her smile widen, her face light up, genuine elation and curiosity softening her features.

(And somehow -

somehow it means so, so much more than_ love.)_

...

And later - Alana panting, arm thrown over her head, her hair matted and tangled and in startling contrast with the white of his sheets, sweat beading at her upper lip, tugging at his hair (as if he could _get_ any closer)- he thinks of other stanzas. Will has never been one to swoon over E.E Cummings, but it floods into his mind now; _and possibly I like the thrill of you under me quite so new_, except this isn't new but the thrill of her never fails to entice him. Alana Bloom turns him into some smitten, snivelling creature, some cliche hopeless romantic he never thought he'd have an excuse to become. She makes him think of_ poetry_, for God's sake.

She makes him feel things he never knew he was allowed to feel.

4

Alana is so brutally honest, so heartbreakingly loyal. If it's not in her words it's in her eyes, the ones he, of all people, finds unbearable to not look at instead of the other way around. Even when he's saying goodbye.

It's not about leaving it off on a bad note, on leaving with anger and tears and unspokenness mounted on his back, weighing him down. It's a mutual agreement, sort-of, even though he's the one putting thousands and thousands of miles between them. It's about putting the trauma, the newsstands, the courtroom, the scar, all of it, behind. Even her.

Still, the agreement is also mutual that: they still love each other. Will apologizes, he begs, feels the compelling need to explain, but in the end, he doesn't have to. She understands. It's both their fortes: understanding. But hers comes with: compassion.

He knows that in death there is no grand exit, no profound sacrifice, no turbulent legacy sprawling along behind you; not the golden greatness of leaving this life as told in all the quixotic stories, the movies, the books. No; just an ending. Quick and not quite so merciful.

It's the same with leaving.

There is no benefit, no healing, just wounds gaping open, new ones not evoked by tangible scars and lesions.

If asked how many days its been without her he'd say he's stopped counting but that's not true, he counts, calculates, keeps track of everything and he can't help it. It comes like the empathy, the memory, the arithmetic of their departure.

There are times when he's angry, at himself, at her; there are times when it all catches up and he almost wants to laugh at the absurdity of their predicament.

But then he remembers her face when he left; she was wounded, far beyond the physical meaning of the word. There had been something far more than regret in her eyes. She'd told him to take care of the dogs. He told her to take care of herself.

He wonders if she has.

5

Molly is the exact opposite of Alana; tall limbs, freckled skin, reddish-blonde hair, warm brown eyes. Alana wonders if he saw that, if he did it on purpose. But that's ridiculous. Of course he didn't fall in love with her for everything she's not.

Alana doesn't know why, but their opposing exteriors harrows some part of her deep down with an icy shiver; maybe this was how he tried to forget her.

There's a voice in her head like an angel and devil on her shoulders, except they've morphed into one and the angel has a devil's glare, snarls maliciously, _you fucked up his life once, don't you dare fuck up his marriage._

...

But later, he leans against the the doorframe of her lecture hall casually, arms folded, a baleful sense of deja vu crawling under his skin. It's hard to breathe, it comes serrated, choking, as if his lungs were full of sawdust, and so does his speech; notched and quivering.

"You gave me hyacinths first a year ago;

'They called me the hyacinth girl.'

—Yet when we came back, late, from the Hyacinth garden,

Your arms full, and your hair wet, I could not

Speak, and my eyes failed, I was neither

Living nor dead, and I knew nothing,

Looking into the heart of light, the silence.

Oed' und leer das Meer."

Will didn't plan on that, but somehow it's exactly what he wanted to say.

She doesn't remember much from that halcyon night, whether they laid on her sheets or his, what dreams had awoken him, what words were spoken before and after his recitation, only that it was happy, tinged sepia with everything they were, before. They were a lot of things before.

She thinks of his house by the ocean and the meaning of the last line: desolate and empty the sea.

The room goes very quiet, still. Poised and waiting. Alana stares at him helplessly, as if she's trying to catch herself from a fall. Will looks to be dazed, and she wonders vaguely if he's drunk, if that's why he's decided to barge into her classroom and recite poetry for her. Everything seems to be holding its breath.

"T.S. Eliot," she says dumbly, cracks in the stillness, "_The Wasteland._"

He nods, swallows. He says,"You," watches the memory and the desire flicker and brim up in her eyes; "the hyacinth girl."

(and somehow; somehow it means so, so much more than _love_.)


End file.
